1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical disk drive adapter, and more particularly, to an optical disk drive adapter installed in a standard optical disk drive, such as a compact disk (CD drive, a digital versatile disk (DVD) drive, or a blu-ray disk (BD), which can read a coin-sized optical disk to work the coin-sized optical disk used for a mobile system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional optical disk drives are inexpensive storage devices used to read data from and write data onto disks having diameters of 12 cm and 8 cm of the standard. When compared with other storage devices, such as hard disks or flash memories, optical disks have a disadvantage of long access time but have advantages in that the insertion and removal of optical disks can be easily performed, thereby increasing portability and making mass distribution at low cost possible. Also, optical disks have a mass storage. Among the types of optical disks, read-only memory (ROM) disks can store large multimedia files such as music, movie, or text files, or mass program including games or software.
With the recent progress in mobile systems, the demand for small form factor mass storage devices has been increasing, and subminiature flash memories and hard disks are particularly in demand because of their convenience in use and mass storage. However, if the demand for ROM media is increased to enjoy music and movies and ROM media provide higher quality and performance, subminiature mobile ROM media are expected to be commercially available. In this case, subminiature optical disks may range from a coin-size to a size with a diameter of 5 cm. It is uncertain what size will be standardized.
While drives used for subminiature optical disks and standard optical disk drives can use the same pickup head theoretically, the diameters of hubs in the standard optical disk drives are generally greater than those of the subminiature optical disks, the standard optical disk drives are not suitable for the subminiature optical disks, thereby making it necessary to manufacture subminiature optical disk drives additionally. However, subminiature optical disks are difficult to manufacture, are not standardized yet, and are expected to be expensive even after being commercialized.
Combination drives that can write and read data on both standard optical disks and subminiature optical disks using two separate hubs have already been suggested. However, since the combination drives should be purchased in addition to the conventional standard optical disk drives, economic burden on users is increased and thus demand is restricted.